Saturday, April 23, 2016

Brexit Bollocks

A common
complaint about the referendum debate from so-called “ordinary voters” is that
while soothsayers and their opinions are many, facts are depressingly thin on
the ground. In default of facts, the public is bombarded with unverifiable
assertions whose reliability tends to be in inverse proportion to the
confidence with which they are expressed. Some of the most forceful of these
are manifestly untrue and routinely take the form of histrionic tantrums and
insults - humorous and otherwise - directed at opponents. Bombast and fury,
notably from advocates of the ‘Leave’ campaign, occupy the sound waves and
headlines, elbowing out rational argument and well-researched analysis.Boris Johnson’s scatological quip about the government’s
referendum leaflet, for example, tells us less about the quality of the
document than about the puerile humour of a man who, by some accounts, is using ‘Vote Leave’ as
part of a plan to replace the current occupant of Number 10. If he succeeds, he
will be the first overt buffoon ever to lead the country. Ambition, cold
calculation of personal or corporate advantage seem more present among the
‘Outers’ than concern for the country’s future.

By contrast,
the ‘Remain’
campaign seems oddly low-key - probably because it is difficult, perhaps
impossible, to be passionately angry about advocating “no change”. Yeats’ unforgettable
lines come to mind:

“the best lack all
conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate
intensity.”

Not that we
should in any sense admit the current UK prime minister into the ranks of “the
best”. He is, as Anthony Barnett describes in his excellent piece, an inveterate
dissembler, a callow purveyor of untruths. But with respect to the referendum,
the arguments for ‘Remain’ put forward by Cameron’s team - and by Corbyn’s for
that matter - give the impression at least of appealing to our intellect rather
than to crude emotion.

What is
lacking so far in the ‘Remain’ camp is any sign that the manifest absurdities
ofprominent ‘Out’ campaigners like
Johnson are being subjected to scrutiny. So here is a taste of what such
scrutiny might reveal.

Among
Johnson’s recent pronouncements is a claim that President Obama is a hypocrite for recommending that the
UK remain in the EU (with a concomitant loss of sovereignty) when the US wouldn’t
dream of sharing its own sovereignty with any other nation. That Johnson feels
free to voice such an offensive insult suggests that he will say anything to
advance his case regardless of whether it is fair, true, or an appropriate way
of referring to a foreign head of state prior to a visit to this country.This is embarrassing enough; but even worse
is that his remark is patently untrue.When, in 1994, the US government entered into the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it surrendered a substantial degree of
autonomy, as did the co-signatories Canada and Mexico. A complex and
substantial range of NAFTA rules and regulations governs trade and investment
between the three countries, a fact that has given rise to unease in some quarters at the
loss of sovereignty supposedly involved.

The idea
that trading arrangements in the modern world are free of political
consequences is, to borrow one of Johnson’s favoured epithets, piffle. All such
agreements involve releasing control over some aspects of national economic
life in return for expected advantages. Whether these involve a fundamental
loss of sovereignty, rather than a reversible one, is another matter. ‘Leave’
campaigners are fond of pointing out with declamatory relish the percentage of
UK laws now made in Brussels (a Farage speciality), and that various desirable
initiatives of the UK government are stymied by EU regulation. What they
overlook is that the UK parliament remains sovereign in law and that while, on
joining the European Community (as it then was) in 1972, it agreed to acknowledge the
supremacy of European law, it could not and cannot bind its successors. Like
other EU members, the UK can repudiate existing EU legislation or refuse to
sign up to new legislation with which it disagrees. As I have signalled in a previous piece,
other EU members have a decidedly pick-and-choose attitude towards EU
legislation; and the idea that the UK lacks this element of discretion is, to
borrow once more from Johnson, bunkum.

One of the ‘Leave’
campaign’s most outspoken storm-troopers is Daniel Hannan who, despite his distaste
for the EU, is an elected MEP with a right therefore to enjoy the associated
perquisites. A curious reversal of Groucho Marx’s refusal to join a club
willing to accept him is Hannan’s adherence to a club that he evidently feels
should have no members at all - not UK ones at any rate.

As readers
wearing armour plate can verify for themselves, Hannan
has assembledwhat he doubtless
considers to be an imposing armoury of munitions against ‘Remainers’ and
everything they stand for; and he expresses himself with the frightening
self-confidence of someone for whom doubt is an alien concept, and facts are
discardable or subject to revision if they fail to correspond with his
vision.

An anti-EU article by Hannan in The Spectator offers a summary of his views. He begins by
telling readers that: “… the migration and euro crises are deepening, and
Britain is being dragged into them.”As an exercise in misrepresentation this could hardly be bettered. Given
that the UK has not adopted the common currency, the euro troubles to which
Hannan refers can only affect the UK indirectly through commerce; and since no
one is advocating a cessation of trade with the EU, the issue is irrelevant to
the case for or against Brexit. More sinister is Hannan’s reference to
migration because it directs our attention, as he doubtless intends, to the
refugees flooding into southern Europe from various conflicts in the Middle
East, North Africa and elsewhere. Their numbers certainly qualify the
phenomenon as a crisis, but it is not one created by the EU.
If responsibility lies anywhere beyond the conflicting parties themselves, it
is with foreign powers that have interpreted their role on the world’s stage as
a right to meddle, to bomb, to invade, and to sell arms to those regions, with
scant regard for the consequences.

Hannan’s
migration comment slides neatly over the UK’s own role in fomenting the
migration crisis: the wreckage of Iraq that gave rise to ISIS, a dithering intervention in Syria, military
adventurism in Afghanistan, Cameron’s pathetic failure to keep his promises on
Libya, and so on. The inference is that we can and should close our eyesand borders to the refugee problems facing
Greece and Italy, and instead pursue a policy like those of Hungary, Macedonia
and now Austria aimed at keeping out
unwelcome hordes.If Europe is
descending into what may be the kind nationalism that we saw prior to WWII,
then the EU project may come to an end anyway - not for the reasons cited by
Johnson and Hannan, but because of a dispiriting failure to exercise the common
solidarity that, in a globalised and increasingly volatile world, is critical
to our well-being.

What of the
accusation that Brussels obliges the UK (and presumably all the other members)
to accept unwelcome regulation? Here is Hannan comparing Swiss “liberty” with
EU regulatory oppression:

Describing the EU as “malicious”, and its activities as a
“menace” to London anthropomorphises it as a villainous creature intent on
doing us down. Since Hannan offers a list of malign EU initiatives, let’s take
a look at them. The Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD)
represents an attempt to limit systemic risk in the “alternatives investment”
market, such as hedge funds and derivatives, that are widely considered to have
contributed to the global downturn of 2008. Despite coming into force in 2011,
only a handful of EU members have bothered to ratify it - the UK being one of
them. No one forced the hand of government to sign up, and given the havoc
wreaked on the world economy by out-of-control financial speculation, the
menace would seemto be not in Brussels
but in the minds of those who wish to allow fund managers to carry on as
before. One can only wonder at the reason why Hannan thinks the AIFMD threatens
our well-being.

The
short-selling ban is a piece of legislation designed - like the AIFMD -to foster financial stability in the light of lessons
learned in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, and it contains exemptions available
to all member states; while the cap on (bankers’) bonuses - at an almost
grotesque maximum of 200% of pay - seems so absurdly innocuous that to cite it
as an example of EU maliciousness is either perverse or simply weird. Finally
the Financial Transactions Tax is an initiative of the European Commission in
which fully half of the EU members - including the UK - have opted not to
participate.

In summary,
Hannan’s terrifying examples of EU malevolence turn out to be neither
terrifying, foolish, oppressive, malevolent, or even obligatory.

Turning to
the cost of EU membership, Hannan refers to an obscure paper by “ProfessorHerman Matthijs of the Free University of
Brussels” in which figures are given for national contributions to the EU
budget. Hannan’s complaint is that Iceland, Norway and Switzerland, which are
non-EU members, only contribute €50, €107 and €68 respectively per capita,
while the UK has to pay €229. What he fails to point out, either because the
message is inconvenient or because of his own ignorance (he incorrectly
describes Professor Matthijs as the only available source) is that the UK’s net per capita contribution after rebate
and financial support deductions is not €229 but €118, equivalent to 2.5 pence
per day.By contrast, France pays €176
per capita, Germany €270, Belgium €302, and Netherlands a whopping €504 [1]. Of
the twelve EU countries that make positive net contributions to the EU, only
Ireland, Spain and Luxembourg pay less per capita than the UK.

The UK’s position as a net contributor to the
EU budget roughly corresponds to the country’s relative wealth per capita. This
may come as a shock to those who have become accustomed to hearing - notably
from ‘Leave’ campaigners - that the UK economy is the fifth largest in the
world. Absolute size is far from being a reflection of economic success, and in
Europe, the UK lies in tenth position in terms of GDP per capita behind
Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands,
and Sweden. Where the country stands proud is not in relative wealth but in
achieving the rank of Europe’s most unequal country.

Hannan’s
peroration in his Spectator article borders on the delusional. In scratching
around for evidence of how we could happily go it alone, he quotes the
following from disgraced Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur
Davíð Gunnlaugsson:

“Iceland is much
better off outside the EU. Unemployment is minimal, purchasing power has never
been higher, and we have control over our own legal framework, currency and
natural resources.”

Some might
consider this comment to be a damned cheek as well as misleading. Iceland is
the country that had to be bailed out by EU countries (plus
Norway) when it went bust; and it adheres to virtually the entire EU framework - including the “Schengen” open-border arrangement
from which the UK is exempt.

On the BBC’s
Today Programme, MP John Redwood, another
‘Leave” proponent, saw fit to trash the recentTreasury analysis of the consequences of
Brexit, before confidently affirming that “we will be better off out”.He then excused the ‘Leave’ campaign’s lack
of supporting data for this view with a stunningpiece of rhetorical self-contradiction: “Who
knows what’s going to happen?”; a
question to which presumably the only possible reply is that of Voltaire’s
potty anti-hero Dr Pangloss: “All is for the best…”

Rhetoric
rather than information is the ‘Leave’ campaign’s main weapon; and its case
rests largely on arousing sentiments of nationalism, on appeals to emotion and
to certitudes whose validity on inspection seeps away like sand through a sieve.

Writing in
1934, Stefan Zweig presciently identified the difficulty as well as the
fundamentalnobility of the European
ideal:

“The
European idea is is not a primary emotion like patriotism or ethnicity;….it is
not the product of spontaneous fervour, but the slow-ripened fruit of a more
elevated way of thinking….the egoism of nationalism will always cut more keenly
through to the average man than the altruism of the European ideal because it
is always easier to be aware…..of one’s own kind than of one’s neighbour….If we
cannot arouse enthusiasm for our idea (of European unity) in the heart and
blood of our peoples, our effort will be in vain, for never in the history of
change has the intellectual sphere and that of patient reflection ever
triumphed.” [2]

His warning
went unheeded, with all the ensuing consequences. Former Greek finance
minister, Yanis Varoufakis, speaks in similar terms in a recent interview with Owen Jones of The
Guardian.His message: we need to bond
across borders if we are to avoid a descent into xenophobia, racism and
ultra-nationalism.

Perhaps, in
the end, we just need to glance back at the last century, and learn.

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